Baig: Google Nexus 7, Nexus Q aim to take on rivals

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

You'll have to stay tuned for my hands-on reviews of the Google Nexus 7 tablet, as well as the black, dome-shaped Google Nexus Q media streaming player announced with some fanfare at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. But with the brand-new hardware, Google has redrawn the battle lines in the hotly contested mobile and media entertainment spaces.

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When it comes to tablets, Google's goes up against the usual suspects, Apple's iPad, of course, but perhaps more directly Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Color — given Nexus 7's $199 entry price and screen size. The Nexus 7 will run on Google's next-up Android mobile operating system, known as Jelly Bean.

The Fire and the Color rely on some flavor of Android, though you'd never know it. And Google will also be competing with some of the smaller Android-based Galaxy tablets sold by Samsung and others. In that respect, Google's situation is similar to what Microsoft will be doing with the new Windows 8 tablets that were previewed last week. Both companies will be walking a tightrope by competing against the very companies that make devices that run on their software.

Meanwhile, the 2-pound Nexus Q player would seem to be Google's answer to Apple TV, though at $299 it costs a lot more than the $99 Apple charges for its diminutive set-top box. Both devices allow you to play movies, videos and music from the cloud through your television.

Google bills Nexus Q as "the first social streaming media player" because anyone in the room can use their Android phone or tablet to contribute content and control what's playing, so long as they're tapping into the Internet, wirelessly or through Ethernet. Indeed, all the content you're playing — songs, HD movies, TV shows and YouTube videos — resides in the cloud. You'll need an HDTV, compatible speakers or audio-visual gear to take advantage of the device. It ships in two to three weeks.

By going with Asus as the maker of Nexus 7, Google, for now anyway, isn't giving most-favored-nation status to its recent acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Nexus 7 houses a powerful Tegra 3 quad-core processor, a 7-inch touch display (1280x800) protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass, and battery life that Google claims can deliver nine hours when you're playing high-definition video, and a couple of hours more if you're Web surfing or reading e-books. It's thin, weighs nearly 12 ounces and has a front-facing 1.2-megapixel camera and micro USB port. Among its features will be the ability to access Google Maps offline. You can also use the so-called NFC technology on board for such services as Android Beam.

You can get the tablet for $199 or $249, depending on whether you go with 8 gigabytes or 16 GB of internal storage. The price includes $25 of credit that you can spend on the more than 600,000 apps and games in the Google Play store, or on music, movies, TV shows, e-books and now magazines. You'll also get a digital copy of the Transformers: Dark of the Moon movie gratis for the tablet, among other free content. And though Nexus 7 will ship in mid-July, Google has begun accepting pre-orders at the Google Play website.

Forrester analyst James McQuivey says, "Learning a lesson from Amazon, Google can see that the only way to beat the premium-worthy iPad is to go for the millions of customers who are ready for smaller and cheaper tablets and then grow those customers into more Android-powered devices and, more importantly, Google-powered services like Google Play and whatever paid video experience You Tube will likely create."

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